"If you knew then what you know now (AKA Starting Over)"

#PokemonGO: Hi all. Level 32 Mystic player here from a Mystic dominated area. Like a lot of folks, the main goal that kept me playing was completing the pokedex for my region. I was able to finally evolve my last needed pokemon (Twister Gyarados of course) during the Thanksgiving event, so I decided to take a look at what my next goal should be. It turns out that I don't really like the game as I was playing it, and most of the issues that I have stem from the prestige system.We all know how painful building up a gym is compared to tearing one down. The best prestige system, in my opinion, was the first one. Pick one fighter and go as far as you can. It's such a huge timesink to have scroll through half of your pokemon 6 times to get a low CP team together, especially now that most gyms are level 3-5. Attackers have the edge on quickly selecting a team and because they can use their highest CP mons, it's less resource intensive. I estimate that by restarting on one of the non-dominant teams and only attacking enemy gyms, I can reduce the time I spend spinning stops just for potions by at least half. I don't have a lot of pokestops near me, so that means less trips to the downtown area to refill my inventory.I created a Valor character on Wednesday, and hit level 20 last night. It's made the game fun again, at least for now. Since I already have a complete pokedex, I don't care to travel across the city to find a nest for a pokemon that I'll evolve and never use. I don't need to keep multiple of each mon hoping for the best IVs or ideal movesets at multiple CP tiers for prestiging. I'm only focused on steamrolling enemy towers, so movesets and CP take priority over IVs. I don't need to keep mons with "defender" movesets, because I don't expect the towers to stay up more than a couple of hours. No more collecting revives just to wake up fainted defenders. They now get transferred for candy. To quote Westworld, maybe "there's a deeper level to this game", and I'll figure out what it is by playing it differently.So far, it's been very liberating. I took down a level 7 gym today that contained two 2600+ CP Snorlax and a 3100+ CP Dragonite using only mons that I have collected up to level 20, none of which have been powered up at all. Almost every egg that I hatch is a new dex entry for bonus experience points. And it's fun to watch the RNG work for instead of against me for a bit. My first egg collected and hatched was a Snorlax, fourth was a Lapras, and tenth was a Chansey. It took over 500 eggs to get my first Snorlax on my Mystic character. I'm kicking myself that I didn't restart during the bonus experience event, but it's still been pretty fast leveling with the daily bonuses and being better at curve balls great throws than I was the first time around.So that's my PSA. If you aren't liking the way the game is played, then play it differently. Once Gen 2 comes out, I'll probably wish I had my full dex again with multiple Onix and Chansey waiting to evolve in my collection. But for now, I'm going to enjoy burning down every blue and yellow gym I see. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2gRpw8L